


Wheels Won't Turn

by hansbekhart



Series: Collected Bones of All Kinds [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Basically the normal Bucky stuff, Body Horror, Except it's super grim, Identity Issues, M/M, Physical Abuse, Psychological Torture, Really not kidding, Recovery, Strangulation, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-26
Updated: 2014-08-26
Packaged: 2018-02-14 17:59:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 15,922
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2200977
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hansbekhart/pseuds/hansbekhart
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There was a reason that he ran, but he doesn’t remember anymore.  He was on his way to the extraction - waiting for night to fall so that he could travel inconspicuously - crouched in a hollow on the roof of an old brick building - a warehouse, maybe - and the fading light - the light caught -  on a blond head down below on the street.  Laughter, and a cadence to the man’s speech that sounded familiar, misplaced <i>R’s</i> and blurry <i>Th’s, quarter, water, this, that, the other one.</i> </p><p> </p><p>-<br/>This story takes place parallel to the next story in the series, <i>Let Your Backbone Flip</i>.  You don't need to read them in order.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Mostly what history can tell you about Bucky Barnes is actually about Steve Rogers.

Bucky Barnes was the oldest of four children. He and his brother were the bookend to a pair of girls, eight years between Bucky and the baby. His family was working class, decently well off for that part of Brooklyn; they didn’t always have much but they never starved, even in the long lean years of the Depression. All the kids worked as early as they were able, which helped. Bucky left school when he was fifteen, and never quite lost his childhood nickname. He was a good student and genuinely bright, a gifted athlete, but none of that mattered much when it had come time to grow up. 

Steve was an only child. He and his mother were very poor and did nearly starve, a few times. History is clear on this point. 

Bucky Barnes was a good kid who loved Steve Rogers as fiercely as he did his brother and sisters, and grew into a sweet man who loved as easily as he laughed, who believed in the value of hard work and the bonds of family and in Steve Rogers. He wrote to his mother and sisters twice a week before he was captured by HYDRA. He never wrote to Steve but his letters reference him often, and almost always ended asking them to look after him. 

Sometimes history will admit that it was Steve Rogers who was the troublemaker, not Bucky Barnes with his bedroom eyes and quick smile. Afterwards this was written as a positive character trait - that Steve Rogers was the same person before and after the serum, that he'd always stood up to bullies and never backed down no matter what the odds - but in Brooklyn it used to scare the shit out of Bucky, who thought sometimes that Steve had decided he wouldn't see thirty anyway so he might as well go out now instead of later, even if it was just against some punk who couldn't keep his yawp shut. 

Bucky Barnes loved dancing, loved Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, loved cigarettes and sci fi pulps and Black Mask magazine. He didn’t enlist, but he wasn’t bitter when he was drafted in ‘40 because that’s how the world worked, and he understood why Steve kept at it, just please don’t say you’re from Jersey, for the love of god. He took to the rifle in a way that the Army needed badly, and earned his rank in only two years. 

He re-enlisted just before Pearl Harbor because the pay was good and he and Steve had gotten an apartment together that summer, finally moving off the Barnes’ couch where Steve had been sleeping since his mother’s death. He was city born to the core and hated being in the countryside with all the passion of a wet cat. He was a good man. A good soldier. A good friend.

What isn't written down anywhere is this:

Bucky Barnes was never the same after tumbling into HYDRA's hands for the first time. They called it shell shock back then and there was little understanding of what happened to soldiers and why sometimes they came back strange. He was never the same, but no one really expected him to be, not even Steve, who knew him better than anyone and knew Buck would climb his own mountains. 

The war turned that sweet kid from Brooklyn into a reserved, efficient killer, who rarely smiled and laughed even less, but it was war and that was what happened sometimes. Steve had never considered sending Bucky back to Brooklyn and Bucky hadn't considered asking. That Bucky might have been changed in a way beyond shell shock never occurred to anybody. On the ground, it was useful - to have someone who could almost keep up with Steve, who could do the things he wouldn’t let them ask Steve to do. Bucky hated Steve being with them more than he hated the war itself, which was saying a lot. 

What isn't written down anywhere is this:

Bucky loved Steve and Steve loved him right back and they fooled around with each other sometimes, the way kids do when their bodies start waking up and there isn’t a lot of supervision. They knew that it wasn’t things boys were supposed to do with each other but thin walls and hard living just made it seem more like something people did but didn’t talk about. 

In Brooklyn what happened between them was just something that happened, just the nature of their friendship, nothing that would have stopped either of them from having _real_ lives outside of Bucky’s childhood bed. Just something that was. It was unusual for them to have their own place - kids usually lived with their folks until they found someone to marry - but it made enough sense with Bucky’s Army pay and getting Steve off his parents’ couch, and besides they’d stopped all that years ago, mostly.

What isn't written down anywhere is this:

Bucky Barnes wrote Steve Rogers dozens of letters while serving, words that burned the pages they were written on, words that were unforgivable not only because they went so far beyond what happened between them in Brooklyn, but because they didn't stop even after Azzano, even after Steve Rogers became the leader of men, after Peggy Carter staked her claim on the Star Spangled Man and practice time was over. It's not written down anywhere because Bucky destroyed each letter as soon as the words were out of him, and he fell from the train with those words unspoken. 

What happened after that goes like this:

First, they broke him. Then they made him into the Winter Soldier.

No. That's not how it goes.

 

-

 

First, they put him in a white room for three days and wait to see if he dies. He has no way real way of telling how long he’s left alone, but it’s three days. There are no windows and they never turn the lights off. One of the lights is about to burn out and it lets out snapping, popping hisses every once in a while. He'd fallen badly on his left arm and in his first brief period of consciousness, he sees a white stick of bone jutting out just above what used to be the bend of his elbow. The two smallest fingers of the hand below it are mottled black and look worse every time he surfaces. His legs aren't broken, but that was about all you could say about them. He doesn’t remember falling.

When he doesn’t die, they bring him out of the white room and into the lab. He’s feverish by then - not really healing, just not dying enough that they think surgery might not be a waste of time. He smells how you'd expect a man to smell, after lying in his own piss for three days, his arm red and swollen with infection, the smallest two fingers starting to rot. He weeps as they strap him to the table. He's insensate with fever and sickness. He doesn't understand where he is or what's happening to him. He begs for Steve as they start cutting through his arm, a few inches above that jut of bone, and keeps begging until the shock knocks him under again. When he wakes up there is a blank space where the bottom half of his arm used to be.

Then a long, hazy period of recovery. They give him injections that make him feel like he’s burning up, like he’s going to die. Slowly, he gets better. He knows that it’s HYDRA who has him and that this time Steve has no reason to think he’s still alive. He plots escapes anyway. Force of habit, or hours where the boredom is almost as bad as the pain. No one speaks to him or uses his name. If they think of him as more than a body (an American, a source of intelligence, a Howling Commando, Captain America's best friend), they don’t say anything about it to him. 

 

\- 

 

One day he hides the tin cup they bring with his evening meal. The next morning he hits a guard with it so hard that it shears clean in half. He puts the jagged shard through the other guard’s cheek, takes both their guns, and gets halfway down the hall before he’s shot with a weapon he's never seen before, that arcs toward him like lightning and puts him on the ground as hard as if he'd just been shot with a bullet.

He goes down on his left side, the one where his arm isn’t anymore, and the pain is breathtaking. He lies on the ground, flinching, limbs jerking helplessly, and watches jackboots slip through the blood dripping from where his arm used to be. Watches a pair of soft soled shoes push through, sees the hem of a lab coat brush against the tile and the blood as the man kneels. "Gut," the man said softly. “Dies ist gut.” More in German that he doesn’t understand. The soldiers pick him up and carry him back into the room, and there they beat him badly enough to fracture a rib and break two fingers. They put a bag over his head and cuff his ankles together. His right arm is yanked up over his head and attached to something. 

When they’re gone he fumbles the bag off his head with the stump of his left arm. The wrist he has left is handcuffed to a grate. He can kneel and he can stand, awkwardly, but he can’t lay down. They leave him like this for four days without food or water. This will be one of the only times during his captivity with HYDRA, with the Soviets, with HYDRA again, that there is a clear line between cause and effect - between behavior and punishment. 

After, he has to be carried to the lab. The doctor there is the one from the hallway, who knelt in Bucky’s blood, but his hands are gentle during the examination and he explains what he’s doing in soft tones. “Antibiotikum,” he says, holding up a syringe and waiting for Bucky to nod. “Narkose,” he says, holding up another. He makes a face like he’s hurt and then changes it to a smile, gesturing again at the syringe.

After the doctor stitches his arm up, he gives Bucky a cigarette and helps to light it for him. Bucky tries to put it out in the man's eye, but he's too weak and he misses. The doctor only smiles and jabs him with another dose of morphine. When Bucky comes out of it, he notices his broken fingers have healed.

 

\- 

 

His world narrows. The room (his room), the lab where they treat his wounds. An interrogation room, although they have never asked him anything; they just beat him until he can’t get up. A different lab, where they inject him with things he doesn’t want to think about. He is moved between these places without a schedule, without any rhythm he can discern. He is drugged, often. Sometimes they turn on the speakers in his room and play music at deafening volume for days at a time. 

Twice they put him in a metal box and put him to sleep. When he wakes up he has days worth of hair on his face and he can’t get warm for hours. Once they attach electrodes to his head and he nearly bites his tongue off screaming. When he wakes up he has burns all over his head and he can’t remember why. Violence comes at unpredictable intervals and narrows his world even further, to places on his body that do or do not hurt.

Somewhere in all of this, the war ends. Bucky is on the winning side. The facility that he is being held in is so deeply buried that none of the scientists there hear about it for nearly six months.

No one speaks to him except for the doctor - at least in any way that matters. He hasn’t heard English since the train and when he dreams the words sound unfamiliar. His German is improving, slowly. Some of the guards speak to each other in what he thinks is Russian. Sometimes he’s sure he’s still in Italy, with Zola and Schmidt - that they’ve simply moved him to another part of the factory for the other doctors to have a turn with. 

His world has been shades of unreality since Azzano, Steve’s big hand on his shoulder, shaking him out of a living hell and standing him effortlessly on his own feet - so it makes sense, that the nightmare never really ended. It makes sense, why they’ve never asked him anything about the Allies’ strategies or troop movement or the Howling Commandos, because none of that ever happened. It would be a relief, that he made it all up - because it meant that at least Steve would be okay, without Bucky there to look after him.

He tells himself stories, when he is alone and not in too much pain and can believe that he’s ever been somewhere in his life other than these little concrete rooms, stories about Brooklyn and Steve and his sisters and his mother. He traces over the scar on his left ankle, where he took a spill down the steps behind his building when he was twelve. The freckles on his shoulders that he got from his mother, who was covered in them. He tells himself about the taste of funnel cake and warm sand and hot dogs in Coney Island with Steve. About the smell of hot garbage in the alleyway underneath Bucky's fire escape, their legs dangling down and his fingertips brushing against Steve's as they handed a bottle back and forth. These times - when he is alone and not in much pain and more or less lucid - are harder and harder to come by. 

He still fights, sometimes. But not often.

 

\- 

 

And eventually, of course, he breaks. They wake him up in a black, sluggish hour that feels like a while before dawn (he hasn't seen the sun for months) and they put a bag over his head and bind his arms to a board behind him, wrenching the left one up to be able to tie it securely. One of the guards puts a gloved hand over the end of his stump and squeezes viciously, for no reason at all; he was half asleep and not resisting. He howls and falls to his knees. And then just waits, for someone to hurt him again or to decide that the pain is over for now. His breath is very loud in his own ears. The fabric of the bag flutters in and out of his open mouth. All he wants is for them to pick him up, set him back on his feet, and not hurt him anymore. To do whatever they're going to do, and then leave him alone.

A boot scrapes down what’s still there of his left arm, stopping just long enough on his shoulder that it feels like touch, like someone’s hand. He’s been in pain - sometimes more, sometimes less, but always, always - for longer than he comprehends, anymore. He realizes - flashing bright across the back of his eyes like a heartbeat, like the slap of his fingertips across the bars of the fire escape - that he can’t remember the last time he heard his own name, even in his own head.

The boot knocks him sideways almost casually, flat onto the cold floor, and without thinking he kicks out hard. That’s the last thing he knows, for a while.

When he wakes up, it’s quiet. He’s in the lab. He’s strapped to the table and the doctor is hunched over the end of his arm. He’s doing something that Bucky can’t see very well, the angle awkward; there’s a whirring sound and a few sparks. It doesn’t hurt, and the relief of it hits him hard just a second before the shame does.

Without pausing in his work, the doctor reaches up and pats Bucky on the shoulder. Bucky curls towards the touch, helplessly. His throat feels gummy and raw. Even odds whether he was kicked in the throat or whether he was sobbing while unconscious.

He remembers being beaten so badly in Italy that he pissed blood for a week. He remembers waiting his turn to shit in the single bucket allotted to each cage of captured soldiers, of lying awake at night and feeling fluid fill up his lungs, listening to muffled sobs in the darkness around him. He remembers being taken away to Zola's lab and understanding clearly that this was it, that he'd never see his family again. He'd never go home. He'd thought of home every day, and now he'd never see it again.

This was it.

"Please," he whispers to the doctor, who quirks an uncomprehending gaze up at him. “Bitte," he says, trying again. "Ich heiße Bucky. Hilf mir. Bitte. Hilf mir, bitte."

The doctor smiles at him, warm. He pats Bucky's shoulder again, his fingers gentle on Bucky's bare skin. "Bitte," Bucky whispers to him, "mich töten, bitte."

"Okay," the doctor says. The word sounds awkward in the man's mouth, but he smiles at Bucky, proud of his English, and Bucky almost cries with relief. "Okay." 

But they don't kill him.

They give him a new arm. They put him back into the box. Zola returns, and they start the conditioning.

\- 

Zola is impatient, demanding. He never seems satisfied with the process of building the perfect soldier. He sits with the other doctors sometimes watching Bucky's physical training, sniffing and pouting and generally making himself a nuisance. Bucky's doctor complains about it sometimes, the way you'd complain to a dog: not expecting any answer but dutiful, full attention. The doctor is proud of the experiment; the others wanted to just kill Bucky or sell him off to the Russians, but he knew the potential was there for something greater. Bucky listens with dutiful attention. Hearing that everyone wanted to kill him doesn't bother him. It's been nearly two years and not a lot bothers him, these days.

Once, his doctor calls him over after his training is finished for the day. He had sparred against six soldiers in various combinations and weapons. Two of them clapped him on the back when the trainer finally called an end. The doctors are sitting at a table at the other end of the room and he sits down at his doctor's feet. He's sweaty and his body feels good except for the arm, which is heavy and always cold and makes strange, unnerving sounds when he moves it.

His doctor is bragging about him. About the arm and Bucky's progress and how quickly he heals from the damage done to him. They spent most of last year refining him - tracking the recovery time of burns, electric shock, oxygen deprivation, broken bones, minor gunshot wounds, stab wounds at different depths and in different limbs. They tell him how many cells he regenerates per hour, as if he'll be impressed. 

"Irrelevant," Zola declares. "And what have you done with this perfect soldier of yours? What does it matter if he can sneak into American bases? You want him to train our people to be better Americans? We could have kept any of these prisoners, not poured money into this one - if all you can produce is an _English teacher_."

Bucky has snuck into American bases, twice, alone. He spent weeks preparing with the doctor and his team, relearning the social cues he would need to pass unnoticed, to get what he wanted. Before the American bases, they took him to a local town three times and on the third time he charmed a smile out of a girl. When they returned, the doctor lavished attention on him - cigarettes, a hot shower, long hours where he talked at Bucky in his quiet voice.

“You are angry that you cannot reproduce him,” Bucky’s doctor says, loftily. 

Zola sniffs. “I am angry that he still has that _accent_.”

This is true. One of the soldiers on the American base had spoken to him only because he'd heard something in Bucky's voice that stood him out of the crowd. He'd asked Bucky where he was from and Bucky had answered, had said _Brooklyn_ because they hadn't told him somewhere else and the man had beamed and said _Queens!_ like that meant something. The soldier bought Bucky a drink and talked endlessly about _Queens!_ and _the city!_ until Bucky had managed to get away, _help me_ still clenched between his teeth. _Brooklyn_ is meaningless, just a word that fell out of his mouth when he needed an answer, but something in the soldier’s voice had felt like home too, like the smell of sidewalks and hot garbage and _Steve_ -

He knows the words, the memories - _Brooklyn_ \- they just don’t seem to matter much. Like they happened to someone else.

He’d sat there, awkwardly, hunched over the barstool listening to the kid talk about _New York_ , and hated himself with a clarity he hasn’t felt about anything for what feels like a long time. He’d sat and actually thought about leaning over and whispering to the guy that Bucky was being watched, that he was being held against his will by people who were hurting him, that his left hand only looked alright in the weak light of the bar, only sounded alright when the whirring motion of _lift, sip_ were covered by the honkey tonk piano from the corner. And said nothing. Smiled and nodded in the right places and after the second beer slipped out the side door and went back to the truck waiting for him.

Told them about _Brooklyn_ and _Queens!_ They’ve been working on his speech since, rounding out his _Th’s_ and _R’s_ \- quarter, water, this, that, the other one. The doctor’s English is poor so other people are teaching him, other people speak at him with soft voices and sometimes touch him - to get his attention or tell him he’s doing well. Sometimes it’s very hard for him to pay attention, but sometimes he plays it up so that someone will lay a hand on his arm.

"Arnim, my old friend," the doctor says, "Why be so petty? My soldier, he is wonderful. He will do anything I tell him to."

"And what do the rest of us get, hm?" Zola asks. "Without me, they would have discovered your little experiment years ago. How wonderful would your soldier be without their money, without this little paradise you have?"

"If you're jealous," the doctor says, "try him out."

There's a moment of suspicious silence. Bucky looks up at the doctor over his shoulder, aware of the vulnerable stretch of his own neck. The doctor makes a careless gesture, and Zola bends closer to where Bucky sits waiting.

"Go kill that man," Zola tells him, pointing at random to one of the soldiers on the other side of the room, who is drinking water with the other men, relaxing - not paying attention to the doctors or to Bucky. He's one of the men who clapped Bucky on the shoulder and gave him a smile. Bucky gets to his feet.

He knocks the soldier down with the metal arm and stomps on the man's throat. The trachea is crushed under his heavy boot and blood spurts up out of the man's mouth and onto Bucky's trousers. He has just a second where the soldier looks up at him - confused, more than anything else - then his eyes roll back in his head. The other soldiers have drawn their weapons but no one does anything. They stand and stare at him like he's a hurricane. Like he's a family pet that decided to bite. The fear in their faces feels good. He feints at one and is delighted when the man falls backwards instead of hurting Bucky. The soldier on the ground is still choking to death and the sound is very loud. Across the room, he can hear Zola's pleased laughter.

 

-

 

They teach him German, Russian, French. Later on, Mandarin, Cantonese, Polish, Romanian. It happens subliminally, while he's in the box. They supplement with a few weeks of conversational training with native speakers. He comes out of the box stumbling, shivering, the new words awkward in his mouth. The box speeds his healing, his learning, his tactical training. He is trained, physically, until the muscles remember everything, even when he doesn't. 

They take him out. They don't always say why, beyond "kill this person" or "kill that person." Sometimes he is out in the world for weeks at a time. He charms strangers. He plans ops. He kills many, many people, up close and from far away. He is Russian, Romanian, American, Ukrainian. He is a soldier.

They put him back in the box. They take him out. They attach the electrodes to his head and measure the damage to his brain. This happens many times. He watches the doctor's hair grow whiter without understanding that it's 1949, that it's 1952, that it's 1957. 

Zola is away often and when he returns he moves slowly and painfully, which is satisfying to the soldier. The doctor still complains about Zola - his restrictions, his evangelism, his missions that send the soldier back damaged. He was caught in his own explosion on the last one and to replace the arm they had to take the six inches that was left of the one he was born with, and parts of the shoulder itself. It was necessary, the doctor reassures him as he comes out of the surgical haze. To counteract the weight and force of the new arm, they've bolted the hardware directly onto his spine. It would help with dexterity and motor control, and really there have been so _many_ improvements. Morphine doesn't work on him long but there's a steady drip and right now he is flying, he is falling. He smiles up at his doctor. 

"I thought we would lose you," his doctor says, and smiles back unsteadily. "But you're all right now."

The doctor turns away abruptly to fuss with the arm. He's been out long enough that the burns have sloughed away, leaving new pink skin all over him in patches. His leg isn't broken anymore, only a little tender when he rotates his ankle. He can feel the edges of real pain around the haze of the morphine, where they cut away at him, but right now he is alright, like the doctor says. "Yes," the doctor says, as if he'd spoken aloud. "And you'll be fine once you rest. I told them they had you in the field too often, that eventually you would tire, and look what happens! You can't _imagine_ what Arnim has been saying, but - I am talking too much." The doctor turns around. His face is pale but his smile is stronger now. "You are all right now and that is what is important. We can prevent these little mishaps by being more careful, yes? And after all, even Captain America wasn't invulnerable."

The soldier breathes. The lab is quiet, just the two of them, and his voice is scraped raw when he asks, "wasn't?"

The doctor looks surprised, which is expected. The soldier rarely speaks. Not unless he is out in the world and orders need to be given. Here he only takes them. Here he speaks when spoken to, and never with a question. The doctor is at a loss for a long moment.

"I suppose I shouldn't have said that," he says, eventually. "I forget, sometimes, that ..."

The soldier shifts. He's belly down and completely naked on an operating table, his left arm supported away from his body on an extension of the table. Both arms are restrained, in fact - but the doctor flinches back anyway. As if he is a family pet who is about to bite. The soldier spreads the fingers of the hand the doctor can see, turning his palm up.

"Please," he says, and realizes that he is crying. It's been so long since he'd felt anything in particular that it astonishes him. His breath is short and his heart feels like it will beat right out of him. He doesn't know why he needs this so badly, this story above any others he could have asked for. The doctor traces the tips of two fingers over the soldier's cheek, just for a moment, and the soldier shudders. The doctor isn't smiling anymore.

"No," the doctor says. "I'm sorry I mentioned him, my child. It's nothing important. Just forget about it."

He doesn’t, though. Not for a long time. He whispers to himself on nights they let him sleep and lets himself feel sadness. Steve is only a word to him now and he doesn’t really know that it’s a name, but it he says it over and over and over, and sometimes it actually helps.

But eventually he lets go of that too.

 

-

 

He rests. He recovers. The new arm is a big improvement. He crushes a man's skull without meaning to, the first time he is taken downstairs to spar. Zola is thrilled. His doctor is quieter these days - something strange and unfamiliar on his face. He teaches the soldier to roll cigarettes, to improve his fine motor skills, but sits mostly silent, his thoughts unshared as they haven't been for many years.

Once when they bring him back in they take him to a room before cleaning him up and seeing to any minor repairs. The soldier is covered in mud and blood and his arm is making a strange sound when he moves the wrist joint. There is a group of five soldiers and three prisoners waiting for him. The prisoners are kneeling on the cold, damp concrete. There are bags over their heads and two of them are wearing lab coats.

"Traitors," one of the soldiers tells him, unnecessarily. He takes the gun he’s given and shoots all three of them in the back of the head, one after another. One attempts to speak, but it's over very quickly.

 

-

 

The doctor is no longer there. One day Zola isn't either. The faces change around him. The flags and languages do too. He stops keeping track. He goes into the box and they bring him out of it. They wipe him and send him stumbling out into the world for a few days at a time. He sees summer, autumn, winter, spring. Not always in the same order, but it doesn't matter very much.

They let his hair grow long. He is no longer a soldier to them. They don't let him plan ops. They don't let him charm strangers. There's not much in him anymore that wants to; he is docile on good days and erratic on bad. Once they pull him out before an op is even complete. Once he doesn't return to his extraction point and they don't catch him for two weeks. They beat him and ask him, after, why he ran and he finds he has no answer. There wasn't a reason, or if there was it's gone, the way most things seem to be gone these days. They hurt him when he isn't compliant, or when he doesn't respond quickly enough. Sometimes he remembers this in time to stop it from happening, but not always. 

They shave his face. They trim his nails. They wash him, sometimes. He's not always sure. He thinks he’s been watching the world happen from outside himself for a long, long time. 

There was a reason that he ran, but he doesn’t remember anymore. He was on his way to the extraction - waiting for night to fall so that he could travel inconspicuously - crouched in a hollow on the roof of an old brick building - a warehouse, maybe - and the fading light - the light caught - on a blond head down below on the street. Laughter, and a cadence to the man’s speech that sounded familiar, misplaced _R’s_ and blurry _Th’s, quarter, water, this, that, the other one._

He watched, fascinated, as the man turned the corner, and then he followed.

It was hours before he came back to himself, and then he simply kept going. He stole clothing to make himself invisible. He ditched the weapons and the gear from the mission. He didn’t particularly feel hunted; if he’d thought about it, he would have assumed they would find him. He went willingly enough when they did, and by that time he’d forgotten the man entirely.

He hates the wipes, more than anything else. They hurt, like everything else, but after they untangle him from the machine and take the guard out of his mouth, he’s weak and shaky and so detached. Nothing is real. Nothing hurts. This is when it’s easiest for them to move him physically - to push his limbs into place, to twist his arms into the jacket and roll socks onto his feet and shove them into the boots. He is entirely without control, and he hates that more than anything.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The metal arm is heavy and cold and he always has to _hear it_. It whirrs and whines and his fingers click against everything he touches. The sound of it makes him sick, all the time. He's full of metal to reinforce the arm, to strengthen it and keep him from hurting himself while using it. He wants to tear all of it out. He wants to tear everything to pieces.

He sees the man on the bridge and he knows him.

 

-

 

They wipe him again. It hurts, it _hurts_ , and then it doesn’t. The doctors hold one wrist and then the other to manipulate him back into his gear, the way you’d dress a sleepy child. He understands this somehow - he is listless and his limbs are still jerking a little - that he is being dressed like a child, that he has dressed a child before. Sometimes this happens to him, flashes of context - they usually go away after they put him in the machine.

He doesn’t want to think anymore. 

They tell him he’s going to kill Captain America, and his heart pounds.

 

-

 

He sees the man, and the man says, “You’re my friend,” as if this means something.

But he lets go of the beam and slides into the water like a knife, kicking hard to reach the man and pull him back to the surface. So it must. It must mean _something_.

 

-

 

The arm is a problem. Dislocated, and fractured just above the elbow. He resets it as soon as he’s away from the water, pausing just long enough to brace himself against a tree and force it back into its socket. The fracture he discovers hours later, after he’s crept into the city proper and broken into an empty apartment. There are clothes that fit him reasonably well, and a shower to scrub the blood and brine and smoke off of him. He palpates the arm afterwards and confirms with muted relief that it’s not actually broken: it takes about a week for a break to heal itself without treatment. A fracture will go away in a day or two. The other arm is fine, only minor damage he is able to repair by himself.

Washington DC is in chaos. There are police and fire trucks everywhere. The damage to the city itself is mostly on the eastern side of the river, where pieces of the helicarriers have fallen as far as a quarter mile into Georgetown. They had washed up on the other side but it’s still unbearable. He feels like he’s breathing in the tension and terror from the people around him and the urge to _run_ is overwhelming. The urge to hide is stronger, so he does. 

The apartment he’d broken into had mail stuffed into the box outside and a musty smell of at least a week’s unoccupancy, so he stays put. He drinks water until his stomach cramps and he throws it back up. He makes a sandwich with ham and cheese from the icebox, mindlessly. His arm aches and he misses the doctors, who would give him medicine if he needed to be active a little longer. He can recognize aspirin as well as he can make himself a sandwich, but it doesn’t occur to him to look for it. He listens to sirens wail. He sweats out the drugs in his system. He doesn’t sleep.

He’s only a few miles away from his own gravestone, but he doesn’t know it.

He leaves the area just before daybreak. The closest safe house he knows of is in Dupont Circle, on the other side of the river. It takes him hours to find a way to cross. The Metro is shut down. The streets are empty of civilians, but busy with soldiers, police. Two MPD officers wander past him once and he kills them both for the uniform of the taller one, to help with the crossing. Finds a place on a big van packed full of people in various uniforms and weaponry, and he stares at his own face in the glass, willing himself to disappear.

 

\- 

 

He watches the safe house for five days. No one goes in or out. The city calms around him. The trains start to run again, on time. People return to work. The world hasn’t ended. 

After five days he walks away. The decision is easy and more a matter of - of choosing to forget why he’d been waiting outside of an unremarkable two story. He’s hungry. There was money and credit cards in the apartment, which he took and then withdrew the max on each of the cards and disposing of them. He eats at a deli with a few sorry tables in the back. He orders what the person in front of him orders. He doesn’t have a plan, either to run away or to be found. He can’t catch his breath and it takes him a long time to put a name to what he’s feeling: afraid.

There’s a sign on the bus stop in front of the deli, with a shield and a star on it.

 

-

 

The museum is confusing. His face is everywhere. It’s on the big mural on the wall. It’s in all of the videos that flicker around him. He sits and watches a short film about the Howling Commandos twice. Once because it’s cool and dark in the room and the second time because he’s sure he missed something. There’s nothing in the film that explains why the man dropped his shield and let himself be beaten.

He combs through the rest of the exhibit. There are letters spread out in long shadow boxes and he sees the name that the man called him by. _James Buchanan Barnes_. He wonders if that’s his handwriting. The letters are charming and funny, mostly about bad Army food and missing _Brooklyn_. They contrast sharply with the blown up photo of James Barnes that stands guard over them, looking like he'd never cracked a joke in his life. He reads the letters through, but doesn’t see anything there either. They’re missing a lot of stuff, he thinks.

There’s a medal underneath a spotlight, all by itself away from the jumble of personal belongings. He doesn’t look too closely at it.

There’s a section at the end about Captain America: Revived From the Ice! and Captain America: The Battle of New York! He doesn’t know that Steve Rogers and Sam Wilson live in DC. He doesn’t know that Steve Rogers checked himself out against medical advice that morning. He doesn’t know that Natalia Romanoff is testifying today, only a few miles away from where he stands. But he knows New York.

 

-

 

He takes Amtrak up and finds himself at Penn, walks over to 45th and Park. It’s not hard to get inside the tower. 

He takes Stark alone, late at night in his laboratory. Video footage from The Battle of New York! show enormous combat capabilities in the metal suit. Top priority is to restrict access to it.

He throws Stark by the throat onto one of the work tables and hits him until he stops thrashing quite so much. He loosens his grip enough to let Stark regain consciousness, then leans in close and says, "Captain America."

"Nope," Stark chokes out, and tries to jam a screwdriver into his eye. He bats it away and sweeps Stark off the table and onto the ground, a knee in each shoulder pinning him down.

"I need Captain America," he says. 

"Are you fucking kidding me," Stark gasps. "He's not here, why would he be here, this is not his fucking house. I'm not his fucking answering service." His eyes are wide and glassy, his breath fast; he's _terrified_ , no matter what's coming out of his mouth. 

He grabs Stark by the hair and shakes him, hard. "I need Captain America," he repeats. His own breathing is nearly as fast at Stark's. He came here because he wanted to know but now he's desperate, he _hurts_ with need. "I know him. He said I was his friend." He lets Stark see the knife in his other hand. "Call him and I won't kill you."

Stark goes still. His eyes fix on the knife. He licks his lips. "I don't believe you."

He eases off Stark's shoulders, crawls back. Lets Stark scramble away and jam a metal gauntlet onto his hand, thrust it out at him like a weapon. Lets Stark sees his indifference to that. "JARVIS, lights," Stark says after a moment, and starts to say, "If you're a friend of Cap's, then why -"

The lights come on, and Stark stops talking. There's a moment of silence, and then Stark says, "I'm going to get my phone out of my pocket." Waits for the nod before doing so. Dials. They wait. Then, "Yeah, hey there, Capsicle. Yeah, I know what - look, there's a hobo with a metal arm in my house who says he knows you and - yeah. Yeah. I figured. Okay." 

 

-

 

Stark and another man escort him to a different floor. The walls are reinforced and the air smells recycled. Containment, for all it looks like somewhere a person lives. The other man - Bruce, Stark calls him - doesn't seem afraid of the soldier at all. It's clear that Bruce is in command. The soldier listens and obeys when Bruce speaks. Bruce tells him to have a seat in a big, stuffed chair, so he does, belatedly remembering to tuck the knife away. They stand and watch him for a long, contemplative moment. He watches them back.

"Isn't that the guy from the news, last week? In DC?" Bruce asks, after a while. His hands are in his pockets. His feet are bare.

"Yep," Stark says. "Looks an awful lot like Bucky Barnes, doesn't he? With bonus hobo grunge hair and scary murder arm?"

Bruce squints down at the soldier. "Sort of," he says, doubtfully. "A clone? Facial surgery, to look like Barnes?"

"That'd be fucked up, wouldn't it," Stark says. "Guess we'll find out."

 

\- 

 

The man from the bridge arrives, and the soldier realizes he's made a terrible mistake.

They all crowd into the room where he's being held, and he allows Bruce to examine him. There’s a lot of very excited talking. Bruce’s hands are cool and his touch capable. The fracture is healed but the arm itself a little tender. The muscle jumps a little in Bruce’s hand as he draws blood. Bruce glances up at his face, then turns the wrist over to take his pulse. He can see how fast his heart is beating by the look on Bruce’s face.

“You’re safe here,” Bruce tells him, as if it matters. “No one’s going to hurt you - as long as you don’t try to hurt us.”

He can’t look at the man. The man won’t look away. He feels hot all over. His whole body aches.

 

-

 

“There is,” Stark says, “a _profound_ level of brain damage.” He gestures - here, and here, on the photo of the soldier’s brain everyone is looking at. “These lesions indicate recent, acute trauma. These -” he points again, here, and here - the soldier can’t tell the difference, it all looks the same to him, “ - these are _much_ , much older. Assuming that this is genuine model Bucky Barnes and not, I don’t know, an evil clone or an alien, you kids predate neuroimaging as we know it. We don’t know what his brain looked like after he was dosed the first time and the scans you’ve got in that cute little folder are from the 70’s. Just a few decades after that little incident on the train, so - not helpful.”

Stark looks terrible in the light. His hands are shaking. There are cuts on his neck and face and a thick bandage under his right eye, which is puffy and blackening quickly. “If I was gonna guess, though, I’d say these old ones were about testing the limits of whatever they pumped him full of.”

“You can fix him, though,” the man says. "Or he'll - the damage will heal itself, like everything else. He'll get better."

“It doesn’t work that way, Steve,” someone says, and Stark sighs.

“I got nothing, Cap,” he says. “The guy’s brains look like mush. He shouldn't be walking and talking, much less creeping into _heavily_ secured buildings to beat the shit out of people at three in the morning. We don't know anything about this guy except he looks like your BFF from the dawn of time. He hasn't exactly volunteered anything. What can I tell you? Most people, they'd be drooling into their oatmeal by now. But most people can't survive a seventy year nap in the snow, so. We have no idea how the serum worked. If we did, we'd have made a million of you decades ago."

“Bucky,” the man says, pleading.

His eyes flicker over - _Steve_ \- and then away.

 

\- 

 

Steve sits and talks to him for a long time. The others drift away. He watches Bruce go and wishes someone would tell him to sleep. Steve says a lot of things. Some of it makes more sense than the rest but it's nothing particularly relevant. 

Steve cries, off and on. Sometimes he laughs at the same time, which is alarming. Steve moves stiffly and he keeps an arm up to protect his belly where the soldier shot him. Still injured, then. Likely easy to incapacitate or kill. He considers it - he let Bruce strip him of weapons, but he wouldn't - 

Steve moves closer, into his field of vision and the soldier jolts out of reach. Startled, his heart beating rabbit quick. Too close, too close. The sun is starting to set and Steve looks like he hasn't slept in a hundred years. His hand drops to his side. The soldier watches it fall.

"I," he says. Steve twitches. It's the first thing the soldier has said in hours.

"Yeah, Buck? What is it?" 

The last time someone looked at him that way, they were begging him not to shoot. He's not sure what to say, so he doesn't say anything.

_I know you._

 

-

 

He sleeps for two straight days and when he wakes up he almost kills Steve and Sam Wilson. He doesn't mean to. He's somewhere else and he snaps back into his body only to find it pinned to the ground underneath Steve's bulk. The room around them is utterly destroyed and Wilson is unconscious, sprawled across what used to be a couch.

Steve makes them all pancakes, afterwards.

 

-

 

"Did I ever tell you Buck hated to drive?"

The soldier doesn't talk much, so Steve talks to Wilson instead. Steve has a lot of stories about James Buchanan Barnes.

"His folks had a car - this beat up old thing - and I know he drove it sometimes, back home. But when we were overseas he flat out refused to drive anything. Cars, tanks, airplanes - a horse! - you name it. Never had a good reason why not, just - didn't seem want to."

The soldier can drive. He can also fly a helicopter and most any small aircraft. He doesn't remember learning any of these things except in quick flashes, the learning so much less important than the ability to do. He's been learning constantly in the last few days. Mostly about James Buchanan Barnes but also about: context. The slow layering of what history is to real people.

He watches Steve surreptitiously, fascinated. He listens.

 

\- 

 

They let him sleep, every night. There's always food, and they let him eat it. Bruce has been true to his word - no one has tried to hurt him unless he tries to hurt them first. He tests this, a few times, before he's satisfied. 

They wouldn't let him leave, but it never really occurs to him to try. It's strange, to have so much time to fill - without training, without a mission, without the box or pain or recovering from pain. He catches Steve asleep on a couch once during the day. He tries it, sleeping when he's not supposed to - and no one stops him. He goes the kitchen to find things to eat, and they let him. They give him more clothing than he knows what to do with, and apologize that there's not more.

They let him wash himself. The first time he stays in the shower until there's a quiet knock on the door, and then he stays longer because no one comes through it. His body feels sleek and well rested and clean. His thoughts clear, a little - or at least, he's not very afraid all the time. Whatever is happening to him now has been mostly painless. If that changes - maybe he can fight back now.

He showers every day, because they let him. Because he can. His body feels relaxed and healthy and good. He touches it - runs hands over his chest, his belly, the small of his back. Finds he still has places that are soft - his dick, the arch of his feet, the skin on the back of his neck. He rolls his testicles in his right hand, feeling the rasp of hair against the smooth skin of his palm. He breathes deep. He sleeps, and wakes up warm.

 

\- 

 

They verify his identity against the DNA of surviving family members. They tell the soldier he's James Barnes. They say it very seriously, as if he had any particular reason to doubt. Steve just huffs and says, "Of _course_."

They ask James a lot of questions. About HYDRA and the Soviet Union and the missions and what makes the arm work. The questions make no sense to him and after a while he tells them that. There was the doctor and there was Zola, and then there wasn't. He was taken to many different places. Some of them were hot, some were cold; sometimes he killed one person, sometimes he killed a lot of them. The arm works.

"Jesus fucking Christ," Stark says. "This is useless and horrifying and I just can't anymore."

"Do you remember who you were?" Sam asks, his voice gentle.

There are words, but they're stuck tight in his heart. He wants to explain. The memories are there, mostly, he thinks - he just hasn't had any reason to think about them for so long. Thinking about _before_ made _now_ so much worse. He put it all away, a long time ago.

"I was a soldier," he says, and Steve makes a quiet, painful noise. Sam tries again.

"I mean - do you remember being Bucky Barnes?"

"Yes," he says, and something flickers over him - irritation. "I was a soldier."

 

\- 

 

“Did I ever tell you Buck was the first person who ever stood up for me? He made me feel like I wasn’t crazy, to be fighting back.”

You were crazy, he thinks. But he doesn’t say it. Just lets the knowledge be there, like a secret: Steve _was_ crazy. 

 

-

 

Steve isn’t always around. Sometimes he’s gone for a long time. And this is something new: James notices when Steve is gone. He’s restive when Steve is gone. He doesn’t like Steve being gone. 

When Steve comes back James tells him this, and then is angry when Steve ducks his head and smiles into his collar. Words come easier now than they used to - he always had them, just didn’t seem to need them - but they get sharper and sharper the more he starts to really think that no one is going to hurt him here. He’s angry now a lot, shapelessly and without reasons sometimes. He hates that everything good that ever happened to him feels like it must have happened to a different person. He hates that Steve has so goddamn many stories about the good old days, and that they’re still so fresh in Steve’s mind. He hates that he wants without direction, without knowing what exactly he’s missing. Everything in him feels like a limb that’s gone to sleep and is now waking up, every nerve caught fire.

He has a name now, and he wants everything else to have a name too.

Steve stops grinning when James grabs him by the front of his jacket and pushes him against the wall. He raises his hands, palms up - he knows James isn’t trying to hurt him - and James pushes him again. His knuckles collide with the solid surface of Steve’s chest. He lets go quickly. He wants to move away, and doesn’t. Stays looking at Steve’s hands, his long fingers.

“Buck,” Steve says. Soft. Trying not to startle. In his chest, James’ heart is jackrabbit quick. They used to touch. 

“We used to touch,” James says.

Steve frowns. “Yeah,” he says. “I mean, yeah, of course - we lived out of each other’s pockets half the time -”

He stops, his eyes searching James’ face. 

_Touch me_ , James thinks, and like he’s said it out loud Steve lifts a hand. Still cautious and slow, but not like he thinks James will run. Like - 

Two fingertips on the side of his throat. Then his thumb against James’ cheekbone. Then the hand sliding back and under James’ hair, the softest imaginable pressure against the nape of James’ neck. Still with his back up against the wall, both of them completely still except for the bend of Steve’s wrist, the press of his hand cupping the back of James’ skull.

\- like he knows just where it will hurt the most.

 

-

 

Later - sweat cooling on his skin, wrapped around Steve chest to thigh, Steve’s dick wet and soft against his hip, feeling Steve’s breath against his neck - he digs his thumb absently into the divot underneath Steve’s left shoulder blade. Steve jumps, and turns his face up to look at James.

“You used to do that for me a lot,” he says quietly. “I had a pinched nerve right there, from my scoliosis. It hurt, all the time. If we sat down anywhere long enough you’d just reach over and start rubbing at it. I think half the time you didn’t even know you were doing it.”

He holds still, but all Steve does is lay his head back down. Cautiously, he rubs a circle into Steve’s skin. 

“God, Buck," Steve whispers. “I missed you so much. You got no idea.”

And James tells him, "I loved you. I was so in love with you.” 

He can tell it’s the wrong thing to say by the way Steve freezes. He lifts his head again and this time his eyes are round and shocked. "I - Buck, what?" he says, stumbling over the words. "Did you?"

He's not sure how to interpret the face Steve is making. "It wasn't like that between us," Steve says, after a long time. "It was just - it didn't mean anything. Buck, I don't think you did. Not like that."

There isn't anything to say to that. He presses little circles into Steve's shoulder and stays quiet. 

 

\- 

 

He loses days, sometimes - or lets them go, he's not sure. That's the thing about flashbacks - they happen for no reason. Or reasons he can't understand. Sometimes they happen and he knows exactly why - can trace the reasons clearly from the smell of a halal cart, or a tone in Bruce's voice, or someone's laughter down the hall - and he's somewhere else. Sometimes he lies awake listening to heartbeat monitors from 1945. Sometimes he's counting breaths, waiting patiently to squeeze a trigger. Music is a problem, which doesn't take them long to figure out. But sometimes they're inexplicable. They just happen.

He doesn't know what Steve thinks. What he imagines is happening inside of James' head when the sound of trumpets sets him pacing for days, unable to sleep. When their first attempt to take James into the world ends with James vanishing for sixteen hours, unable to say after where he'd been or why he comes back to Stark's tower covered in ashes.

 

-

 

They fuck, all the time. They have each other in every room in the apartment they've been holding James in. He wakes up and Steve's name is already on his lips, like the thrum of a heartbeat. Some days he's frantic if Steve is out of his sight - as frantic as Steve is when James is out of his, all the time. They shove themselves together, as if this time is the time that they'll fit.

Sometimes - after Steve pins him against the shower wall and fucks him, nearly dry, the two of them pushing and snarling at each other - Steve can barely look at him. He can't imagine what's in Steve's head, or why he comes back. 

Sometimes - after he pushes Steve down on his knees in the kitchen and nearly chokes him with his cock - it's like they can't get close enough, and Steve clings to him so hard it hurts, it makes him sick and dizzy and desperate and afraid. 

It's the closest he can remember to being alive. He wants to drown himself in Steve. He wants to disappear.

 

\- 

 

One day Steve takes him to Coney Island. They take the subway there. The train is clean and new and moves very fast. "They took down almost all the elevated lines," Steve tells him, even as they come above ground in Brooklyn. "The city looks a lot nicer without them, I think. You remember all the people that got killed on those things? Sam didn't believe me when I told him how it all used to look." Steve shakes his head. "I think he was just being polite, though."

He watches Brooklyn fly past. The car is pretty full and Steve is standing close. He feels very aware of the line of Steve's body, the heat coming off him, the smell of his aftershave. The others didn't want them to do this - to leave the tower. But Steve isn't always around and he'd been gone about two weeks this time, and it had been hard on both of them. When he’d come back, he said they were going out and that was that. It turns out Steve is still a stubborn little shit, when it comes down to it.

There’s a man on the next car back, hat low over his eyes, keeping an eye on them. Steve is aware of him but doesn't seem to mind, so James doesn’t either. 

They go to the aquarium. It's cool and dark inside, and not many people are around. After, they buy hot dogs and sodas and eat them down on the boardwalk. It's strange. He doesn't have context for this. These things that real people do, eat hot dogs and look at fish. Listen to the ocean. It’s not all normal - Steve gets a lot of stares, shakes a few hands, eats twelve hot dogs. James is tense and irritable for a lot of it, sweaty under his long sleeves, restless and wishing they were at home so that Steve could touch him. But it's good. They've been telling him that his war is over - that he can have a life now. Maybe this is what they mean.

 

-

 

One day he realizes that he still had part of his arm for more than ten years after the fall. This time he holds onto the hate and anger and grief and very deliberately sets to destroying everything in the apartment. It's early morning - Steve is asleep in James' bed, and it doesn't take him long to come running.

He nearly puts Steve through the window. Nearly puts both of them through it. The glass cracks but holds and no one has to find out what they look like after a sixty story drop.

They have to sedate him to separate the two of them. The drugs don't do much to calm him down. He's sprawled out exactly where he fell, limbs heavy and uncoordinated, hate so hot in his body he feels like he could set the whole world on fire. 

"It's okay," Steve tells them, thickly, from where he's sitting on the couch with a towel pressed against his face. James broke his nose and at some point Steve bit through part of his tongue, so he sounds a little strange. There’s blood smeared all over Steve’s bare chest, all down James’ too. A silent alarm had brought Stark and Bruce and Sam running. Stark had shot James right in the ass with the sedative. Now they're all ringed awkwardly around Steve, staring down at James like they're not sure what to do, like they'd forgotten what James was. "He didn't mean to hurt me, he doesn't know what he's doing."

"I meant it," James hisses. The words slur together. The metal arm is heavy and cold and he always has to _hear it_. It whirrs and whines and his fingers click against everything he touches. The sound of it makes him sick, all the time. He's full of metal to reinforce the arm, to strengthen it and keep him from hurting himself while using it. He wants to tear all of it out. He wants to tear everything to pieces. 

Steve just looks at him. He's bleeding freely from a cut on the back of his head, where he was slammed into the window. There's blood and broken glass all over the floor. Most of the blood is James', actually - the first thing he went for was the big mirror in the living room. "I meant it," James says again, and then turns over and throws up. Through the haze of whatever they shot him with, he hears Steve go to his knees next to him. He feels Steve's hand rub low on his back. 

"Don't you fucking touch me," he groans, and then crawls into Steve's arms, hiding his face away. 

"So this is a weird way to start the weekend, kids," Stark says. "I was thinking, you know, maybe brunch? A nice walk on the High Line? I guess naked assassin battles are good too. Very Greco-Roman. A little more retro than usual, but hey, live your bliss."

"He didn't mean to hurt me," Steve says again, into James' hair. "It's fine. We're fine."

"Yeah, you look fine," Stark drawls. "All of this seems totally fine. Still a little unclear on the naked thing, though."

"Tony, come on," Sam says, soft. 

Steve looks up, though. James isn’t looking at him, can’t see his face, but he hears the anger in Steve’s voice. “You need me to draw you a map?” Steve draws a hand over his hair when he feels James flinch, like an apology.

James listens to Steve's heart beat. He traces an absent finger over Steve's bare chest. The sedative is fading, and so is everything else. He feels emptied out. The anger is leaving for now and without it he just doesn't feel anything at all. "Let me get some clothes on him," Steve says, finally. "On both of us. Okay?"

"Okay," Sam says, holding up a hand to forestall Stark. "It's okay, Steve."

They lay some towels down on the couch and sit him on top, another towel around his waist for modesty’s sake. Steve disappears long enough to put on some shorts and an undershirt. He and Sam pick up while Bruce cleans the blood off James’ knees and feet. He stares down at the top of Bruce's head and thinks about snapping Bruce's neck. He could do it quickly enough, before Bruce even knew what was happening.

He doesn't want to, though. He's so tired these days.

 

-

 

Later, they go to bed. It’s the middle of the afternoon but the hours have passed in a sort of shocked silence and Steve doesn’t seem to know what else to do. The room is cool and it smells like sex and aftershave and socks in there, and they curl into each other on top of the covers. 

Steve’s eyes are very pale, in the dim light. He stares at James with a seriousness that takes him a moment to chase - Brooklyn, the whir of a metal fan, the smell of summer and the sound of someone breaking bottles in the empty lot below their open window. When James smiles, Steve smiles back at him, breath huffing out in relief. He has two black eyes that are fading as James watches, a whole rainbow of colors blooming across his face. 

On impulse, James reaches out. He’s on his right side so it’s the metal hand, the cold one, that touches Steve’s face. Traces fingertips across Steve’s cheekbone, his bottom lip. Steve lets him, his gaze never wavering. He smells like shampoo, like the disinfectant they sprayed all over to clean up James’ blood. “If they have a problem,” he says, “we’ll leave. We don’t have to stay here.”

He can feel Steve’s breath puff across his face and he thinks: Brooklyn, summertime. The sound of the city through the open window. The two of them as alone as you can get in a row house, when you can hear the neighbors banging shit around through the thin walls on either side of your long, narrow home, when the whole world is right outside your open window. He thinks of Steve’s slim, bony shoulders and the little curve of his belly. Lying on his side and reaching out with shaking fingers to touch the sparse hair there, Steve’s damp, sticky skin. Steve's eyes on him, watching him do it.

“Bucky?” 

He flinches, and comes back to himself. Steve is still looking at him, something shifting and uncertain in his eyes. The bed beneath them is soft and wide, no metal frame to shriek and grumble. They’re miles above the city and it’s been almost a hundred years since he lived in Brooklyn, since he lived anywhere at all. His heart’s beating faster than it should be. He cards his fingers through Steve’s hair, absently. 

“Bucky,” Steve says again, soft. He makes a wordless sort of hum in response, Steve’s hand warm in the small of his back, the weight of Steve’s arm over his ribs an ache he can feel all over.

“Yeah,” he says. Tests out the thought of it, the weight of the name.

“You okay, Buck?” Steve asks. 

“Yes,” he says, and shifts forward to kiss Steve, slow and open and wet. The stubble on Steve’s chin scrapes his bottom lip. Steve’s eyes are open, just barely, little slivers of blue underneath his lashes. They taught each other how to do this. Steve’s hand smoothes down his collarbone, rests over his heart, fingers curled.

They kiss like that for a long time. Eventually just breathing, foreheads together, eyes closed. His hand curled around the back of Steve’s neck, thumb stroking over Steve’s hair.

“You hungry?” Steve asks. He sounds sleepy, drugged. “Want me to order something?”

“Thai food,” Bucky says. “The place on Madison.”

Steve’s eyes open, blink a few times. The hint of a smile in them, coloring the surface of Bucky’s wrist. “Yeah, you got it.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The bridge is crowded. People stop and take photos along the way. He makes himself look up, watch the bridge rise above the river, curling away from the ships passing underneath. Brooklyn draws closer with each step. He doesn't know where his family is buried. He doesn't recognize the shape of the city rushing to meet him.

One day Bucky is alone in the apartment when he hears a noise. He finds Sam Wilson hunched over the kitchen counter, pack abandoned on the ground, blood running sluggishly all down one side of him. He looks up when Bucky approaches, his smile wry and wary. "Hey man," he says. "Sorry to barge in like this, Stark said he'd send someone up."

It's not something that seems to need a reply so Bucky doesn't say anything. There's bits of metal and glass and gravel in Sam's shoulder and arm and scattered around his lower back. "Fell into a pile of trash," Sam says tiredly. "Guess it had to happen sooner or later."

Bucky goes to retrieve the first aid kit from the bathroom. Sam frowns when he comes back. "It's cool," he says. "Someone will be up soon. I'm okay for now."

Bucky shrugs and sets out some bandages and peroxide. Sam eases himself down on a stool, looking skeptical, and lets Bucky cut his shirt away. Bucky holds the tweezers in his left hand, which never shakes. 

It's bloody, but the actual damage isn't so bad. There are six pieces of glass but only two are larger than an inch. It looks like the gravel hurts more, Sam's shoulder twitching under his other hand as he starts pulling pieces out. "So this is a little weird," Sam says, after a few minutes.

Bucky pauses. Tips some peroxide into a long scrape on Sam's back and finds two more gravel bits he missed when the bubbles subside. "Why?"

"Well, you've almost killed me about four or five times now," Sam says. "Didn't really picture you as Florence Nightingale." 

"Why not?" Sam twists to look up at Bucky, a look in his eyes like he thinks Bucky's kidding him. Bucky meets his eyes evenly.

"Don't know," Sam says eventually. "Guess I don't know you very well."

Bucky offers him a smile. The motion of his hands, plucking little bits of hurt out of Sam, is soothing and familiar. "Steve did this for me once," he says to Sam. "Got knocked down, went into some broken glass. It was on this arm though," he tips his chin towards the left one, "so you can't see it anymore. Is Steve okay?"

Sam makes a noise of sheer exasperation. " _Steve_ is fine. He said to tell you he'd be back in a little while, they're doing clean up."

"Okay," Bucky says. His heart squeezes a little; he doesn't always know what Steve does when he leaves. He leans in close to look at the deepest tear in Sam's skin, debating whether Sam would allow Bucky to give him stitches. "You're afraid of me," he says. It's not really a question.

Sam winces. Bucky leaves the big wound alone and grabs some bandages and ointment for the smaller ones. Sam’s shoulder is warm and reassuring under his fingertips. “It’s not personal,” Sam says. 

“I know,” Bucky says. He feels inexplicably shy. "I don’t mind.” 

“Yeah, well, Steve would probably kill me if I admitted that to him,” Sam says. 

“Why?” Bucky asks. A smear of ointment on Sam’s skin, two bandaids on top laid parallel, like railroad tracks. It feels good to be - good. Kind the way that Steve is kind, the way that Sam himself is kind to Bucky, even though he's afraid.

Instead of answering directly, Sam swivels a little on the stool, enough that he can look Bucky in the face. He doesn't shrug Bucky's hand off, though, so after a moment Bucky moves onto the next patch of gravel burn, ointment, bandages. Sam's eyes on him make him feel - uncomfortable. Awkward. "You doing okay these days?" Sam asks, and Bucky snorts. 

"You're the one with glass in your shoulder," he says.

"Yeah, but -" Sam cuts himself off, wincing as Bucky's hand encounters a sore spot. Maybe Bucky should bind his ribs, after he finishes with Sam's back. The big cut is bleeding again, just a little. It should really get stitches. 

"Steve told me that you and he were ... together," Sam says. Bucky looks up, finds that Sam is watching him, an awkward little smile on his face. "I just wanted to ask - you've been through hell. You were tortured and forced to kill people for longer than a lot of people are even alive. Steve is - he's a great guy, he's the best. And I know he'd never hurt you on purpose. But sex can be a lot to handle on top of, you know, relearning basic care, so I just want to ask if you're okay with - everything."

Bucky stares at Sam, confused. He turns the words over in his head, trying to parse what Sam is saying to him. Everything except the big cut is bandaged now. He puts a hand on either side of Sam's rib cage, guiding him to sit up straighter. Sam sighs. "Okay, then. Sorry I asked."

"Steve's fine," Bucky tells him, running his hands down Sam's torso, looking for painful or hard spots. "It's me. It's always been me." Sam frowns. "I masturbate a lot, too," Bucky adds, in case it helps. 

Sam bursts out laughing, but cuts himself off immediately, wincing - one hand going protectively to his ribs, brushing over Bucky's wrist. Bucky flinches. Sam looks up at him, carefully withdraws, and braces both hands back on the countertop. A clear signal: _continue_ , so Bucky does.

"How is this my life," Sam mutters, and then says to Bucky, "well, okay, so, that's, you know - perfectly normal. Does it help? To," he makes an abstract gesture with one hand. 

"Masturbate," Bucky guesses, and Sam rolls his eyes heavenward. "Oh. Yes."

And then, hesitantly, "Sometimes. I don't know."

"It's okay not to know, just ..." Sam trails off. "I was gonna say, don't do anything you don't want to do, but I guess that's sorta been your problem, isn't it?"

Even more confusing. "Nothing's broken," Bucky says, and steps away. "You need stitches on that one near your armpit." He lays two metal fingers on Sam's side, not too close to the cut, to show him where it is, and Sam shivers. Bucky's fingers curl back, and he tucks the arm into his side.

"Yeah, I figured. I guess someone'll be up in a bit to take care of it. The uh, the rest of it, I feel a lot better. Thanks, Barnes."

Bucky retreats to the first aid kit, pops a few painkillers out of their blister packs, lays them on the counter near Sam. Looks at them for a second, and then goes and fills a glass of water. Sets that next to the pills. "Bucky," he says. "Call me Bucky."

Sam is staring at him with a strange look on his face. He's seen Steve look like that sometimes - considering. "What?" he asks. 

"Nothing, just," Sam shakes his head. "This is the first time you've said more than ten words to me. Thought maybe I smelled bad or something."

"It's not personal," Bucky says, and Sam smiles.

"Look at you, cracking wise," he marvels, and Bucky smiles back, pleased. The novelty of having a conversation with someone who isn't Steve is - nice. His other hand is shaking, and he tucks it behind himself, knits it in with the metal one. He used to know how to do this. 

"You really aren't what I was expecting," Sam admits.

"What were you expecting?" Bucky asks, and for just a moment Sam's face freezes like it can't figure out what to do, what to say, and Bucky hears the answer like his doctor has whispered it into his ear: _my soldier, he will do anything you tell him to._

The look on their faces, when he had. Each time he'd come back in from a mission, the way they'd watched him. Coming up from the cold, seizing and disoriented and terrified, surrounded by guns already drawn.

Whatever Sam manages to say, Bucky isn't listening anymore.

 

-

 

He leaves Sam in the apartment and goes to sit outside, on Stark's balcony. This high up he can't hear the city noise. All he feels is clean, cool wind on his shoulders. All he can smell is his own cigarettes, the sulphur strike of the match against the pack. It helps, a little. He breathes. He doesn't have a name for what he's feeling, the jumble of heat and shame and frustration roiling in his chest. He smokes another cigarette, and another. 

He's still outside, when Steve comes back. He hears the door slide open and snaps back into awareness, looks down at his hand to see that the cigarette's gone out, a column of ash on top   
of his bare feet. Steve's still in uniform. He sets the shield down before sitting next to Bucky, pulling off the mask with a long sigh. Bucky looks down at the shield. It glints in the fading sun, less than the arm does, which is shiny and hardly ever seems to scratch. In contrast, the shield looks like it's seen better days. Bucky reaches for it, curls both hands around it. The rim of it digs into his thighs, his calves where he's cradling it in his lap. Steve doesn't even react, his head dropped back against the couch, eyes closed. His throat is bare and mesmerizing, and Bucky wraps the left hand around it and squeezes.

Steve opens his eyes. Bucky's heart stutters, for just a second, but he keeps his hand where it is, gripping Steve's throat. Steve is grimy where the uniform didn't cover him, and he looks tired.

"Why aren't you afraid of me?" Bucky asks.

Steve swallows. Bucky can feel Steve's heartbeat in the pads of his fingers. "Why would I be?"

It's a stupid question. "I kill people," Bucky says. "I've killed a lot of people."

"So have I," Steve says. "I don't know where you're going with this, Buck."

"I could kill you," Bucky tells him, even though he knows a lie when it's coming out of his own mouth. 

The corner of Steve's mouth lifts. "You had your shot," he says, like it's funny, and Bucky snarls at him: "You don't get to laugh about it, Rogers." The hand whirrs as he tightens his grip, Steve's throat turning white and blotchy underneath his fingers. Both of Steve's hands come up, wrap around the metal - not struggling, even as his breath gets thick and fast - staring Bucky straight in the face - refusing to look away.

He lets Steve go, pulls away, curls into himself. The shield drops out of his lap and onto the ground. Arms wrapped around his knees and bare feet up on the couch. Listens to Steve wheeze for a second before he can get his breath back. 

Steve's hand is warm on his shoulder and Bucky wants to lean into it, wants to push Steve face down into the couch and fuck him, right out here in front of god and New York City, wants to curl up into Steve and go away for a while. "I killed all those people," he says into his knees, his voice dull. "It was me."

Steve, damn him, finally tumbles to what Bucky's trying to say. "No, Buck," he says, urgently. He's close enough that his air brushes over the nape of Bucky's neck. "It wasn't you. They made you do it," he says, when Bucky shakes his head.

"You don't know shit," Bucky tells him. His face is hidden between his thigh and the underside of his right arm and it feels good, his whole world warm and scratchy with hair, the air in his nose humid and smelling of his own body. "I coulda left. I coulda tried to run."

"Did you? What would they have done to you if you did?"

Bucky frowns. Chases hazy memory: jackboots slipping through a pool of blood. His right arm in agony above his head. The razor pain of a cracked rib, cutting every breath into pieces. The urgent need to shit twisting his whole body in knots, trying to hold out just a little while longer. The shake of humiliation and fever wracking all the way through him.

"I coulda left," he says. Steve's whole body is wrapped around him, framing him. 

"You're so goddamn stubborn," he whispers. "It wasn't you, Buck. You didn't have a choice. They tortured you."

"You don't know what they did."

"I read the file HYDRA had on you," Steve says, and Bucky's shoulders pull in on themselves, every nerve in his body screaming. It hadn't occurred to him that there would be a file, that they would have kept records of what was done, that Steve of all people would read it. Steve lets him go, lets Bucky scramble backwards and there's a long moment of silence where they just look at each other. 

"You don't know," Bucky breathes. The words stutter and shake on their way out. "The first time they sent me out it was to a - a test, to an American base, and I drank a beer with a guy and then I _went back to them_. I did that. I did all of that, whatever you think you saw in, in some fucking file."

Steve leans forward and Bucky puts both hands up. He can't get his fingers to uncurl out of fists. The right hand is shaking. "Even you think I'm some kinda wild animal," he says. 

"I don't, I don't think that," Steve says, putting his own hands up. There's a long, jagged tear down his right glove and Bucky grabs Steve's arm, sticks his fingers into the hole, searching for unbroken skin underneath. Steve lets him, doesn't resist as Bucky yanks him forward, closer. 

"You should think it," Bucky tells him. "You'd be right if you did."

Steve shakes his head. The skin on his arm is intact and relief slides through Bucky like a wave. "You don't know," Bucky tells him. He tries to make his tone gentle but it just sounds rough and scratchy to his ears: pathetic.

"Okay, so I don't know," Steve says. "I would if you told me, though." He slides his hand up and down Bucky's arm, comforting. One of his knees is between Bucky's thighs and Bucky's dick feels heavy in the loose pants he's got on, and if he was better, clearer, calmer he'd slide up onto his own knees to grind his dick up against Steve's instead of letting his fucking mouth keep talking.

"I don't want you to know," Bucky says, but what comes out next is the earliest memory he has of after: "After they found me they left bones sticking out of my arm for days. My fingers were rotting right off my hand. I didn't know where I was. I thought I was gonna die."

Steve's face goes so white he stops himself from saying any more. The words themselves hurt coming out, jagged edges that push out of his throat like shards of glass, like gritty sand in his mouth. There’s so much he’s never said to anyone, never had anyone to say these things to. But he doesn’t - 

He doesn’t want to hurt Steve. The idea of it an anathema, now. (On the helicarrier, shoulder dislocated, arm fractured, head bleeding, body injured, tired and hurting and afraid, he’d felt vicious, feral joy seeing the last bullet strike home.)

He lets go. "I like killing people," he tells Steve, "I like hurting them. I like when they're afraid of me. You're the only one who's too chicken to see me for what I am. Your friends would put me down if they could, but you're too stupid to let it happen. How long do you think you can keep me locked up in here, Steve?"

Steve reaches for him, and Bucky jerks back. Steve sucks in a little breath - but then his jaw tightens up and his shoulders square. He sets his hands in his lap, palms up. "Until you don't want to be here anymore."

Bucky eyes him, warily. "You can't let me leave," he says. 

Steve shrugs. "Go ahead. Get out of here. I won't try and stop you. No one will."

He feels caught. Frozen in indecision. He sets one foot on the ground, weight shifting, fists up in case Steve isn't telling the truth. Steve just sits there, shoulders relaxed, face tilted up, any marks on his throat already faded. 

Bucky takes a step. Another. Steve watches him do it. His chest feels hot. His stomach hurts. He's at the door now, and the moment breaks.

He takes two knives from the kitchen. He grabs Steve's shoes from the hall and puts them on in the elevator. He throws his phone into a garbage can outside the building. He’s not positive Stark hadn’t put a tracker in his arm when he was deactivating the ones HYDRA put in there, but there’s not a lot he can do about that short of leaving the arm behind as well. He goes out into the world. 

Manhattan is loud and confusing but it’s not much worse than Coney Island, the sheer variety of noises and sound and people veering in and out of his awareness, trying to get somewhere else in a big damn hurry. It gets easier as he moves south, away from midtown, where the streets don’t smell so antiseptic and faces get a little bit less pinched. He walks west just to stay where the shops are bursting with green, living things. He follows people at random for blocks at a time, zig zagging east as the street numbers wind down. 

He hasn't been outside for - a month, maybe. Hasn't been by himself for - he stumbles over his own feet. He rights himself in the same step, but fear flickers over him. He doesn't know how long it's been, since he's been with Steve. Weeks? Months? Has it been years? He slows when he passes a newsstand but the date on the papers is meaningless. He feels dizzy with it, time stretching out like the avenue underneath his feet, and he'd been so busy watching one foot step in front of the other that he hadn't even noticed. The sunlight is weak and cold.

Two blocks later is a park and an empty bench that he slumps into, gratefully. There are fat squirrels on the grass and the air smells sweet from the nut cart a few yards away. There are people all around him. It's starting to rain, but he doesn't notice. For little while he can't remember where he is but that's - almost normal. It's the sudden lack of when that's terrifying. 

He used to be somebody. He used to live here. He used to have a friend named Steve, who was the scariest little bastard Buck had ever met. He used to have a family who loved him. He doesn't really know when that changed, when it ceased to matter, and it's so fucking unfair that he knows all the pain and the terror and the cold and the killing and the little scraps of kindness, but doesn't know when he stopped being someone who had a name.

 

-

 

He walks for a long time. Buildings become smaller, dingier, and then start to rise again dramatically. He can't bring himself to talk to anyone, to try and be charming. He has the words but maybe they're not the right ones, not anymore. He sees himself pass in shop windows, tugs his sleeve down to hide any glint of metal. He walks the streets of Manhattan and it's 1927, 1939, 1968, 1994. The city rises and falls in his memory, wooden signs and cobblestone streets, neon lights, snowbanks as high as his head, graffiti, speakeasies, disco, the heavy clip clop of horse hooves. He rests whenever he finds trees, little pockets of greenery carved into the landscape.

This is how he makes his way to the Brooklyn Bridge. There's a park across the street from the pedestrian plaza and he sits under a tree for a long time, trying to stop his hands from shaking.

He tugs the elastic out of his hair and pulls it back up again, mechanically. He hasn't cut his hair since 1945 and it fits neatly into the loose bun he wears these days. He smooths any flyaway strands back, takes a deep breath, then another. He tugs the hood up over his head, tucks his hands into his pockets. And walks.

The bridge is crowded. People stop and take photos along the way. He makes himself look up, watch the bridge rise above the river, curling away from the ships passing underneath. Brooklyn draws closer with each step. He doesn't know where his family is buried. He doesn't recognize the shape of the city rushing to meet him. 

He realizes, abruptly, that it's raining, that it's been raining for hours. He's soaked all the way through. He stops walking, right in the middle of the pathway, and tilts his head up to the sky.

He's not sure what he thinks will happen, when he steps off the bridge and into Brooklyn for the first time in seventy one years. There are bright white lights guiding people off the walkway and towards the waterfront, and he follows the crowd until it thins out a bit, people drifting off, the sound of conversation fading against the white noise backdrop of the East River and the BQE. He feels - quiet. Expectant. 

He draws in a long breath, and then another. He looks up into the traffic camera that had turned slightly to watch him pass. "All right," he says to it. "You can tell him where I am."

He sits down on the barrier wall to wait. It's quit raining but the concrete wall is wet and cold. There's a haze over the city, like someone's smeared Vaseline on the lens. It's beautiful. The bridge is a solid presence over his right shoulder, strung all over with sodium lights. Water laps up against the high barrier, smelling briny and familiar.

After a while, he hears a scuffle in someone's step. Steve, warning Bucky of his approach. He sits down next to Bucky, unmindful of the wet concrete. He's got three slices of pizza in each hand, stacked on greasy paper plates. He hands Bucky one set and they sit and eat in silence.

"How long have I been here?" Bucky asks, once he's finished. He tips the paper plate towards the ground, letting the grease run off before he folds it into it a ball. 

"Seven months," Steve answers, a little muffled - his mouth full of pizza. He swallows and adds, "and two weeks and a day. If you wanna be exact."

"What month is it?"

"October," Steve says. 

Bucky nods, staring down at the crumpled plate in his hands. "I missed your birthday."

"That's okay."

Steve takes the plate from him and throws their garbage away. Returns with his hands tucked into his pockets and they sit and watch the city in silence. After a while Steve says, "You remember we used to swim in this sometimes, in the summer?" 

It's more of a sense memory than anything else. The weight of the sun, the creak of the docks, the slick wood underfoot. Steve's sunburnt shoulders. Bucky's wet underwear sticking to his ass, the fear of them sliding off as he dove back into the river. Rinsing off in the spray of a fire hydrant. All of it so far away it might as well have happened on a different planet. 

But he does remember. He does. 

"I want to read my file," he says. Out of the corner of his eyes he sees Steve nod.

“I figured,” Steve says. He digs one-handed into his pocket for napkins, hands half of them over to Bucky. “I’ve got it for you, back at the Tower.” He hesitates. “Do you - want to tell me about any of it?”

Bucky curls his left hand, inspecting in between the joints for any leftover pizza grease. Sighs, looks over. “I don’t know, Steve,” he says.

“It wasn’t your fault,” Steve says. In the orange light of the bridge he looks very sincere. Bucky can’t even remember how old he was when they first met. “You know that, right?”

"Steve," he says, exasperated, "In a world where I was either a person who could make choices or a - a rabid animal who had no control, what do you think I'd want to be? If I don't -" 

He has to stop, the words crowding into his throat and he thinks run away, and then forces them out anyway. "If it wasn’t something I could have changed - if I really couldn’t have fought back - I hate that worse. If I don't blame myself, then I don't feel anything at all. You hear me? I don't want to be like that again. Not ever. I'll take it."

"But -" Steve says, and Bucky throws up a hand.

"Steven Grant Rogers, you _listen to me_ ," he snarls. "I'll take it."

“All right, all right,” Steve grumbles, face mutinous. “It's all your fault, you dumb shit. I don't know why you'd listen to anyone tell you otherwise. Anyone ever tell you you're more stubborn than god?"

"That's rich, coming from you," Bucky says, and adds, "and I _was_ in love with you, you fucking mook, and don't you try and tell me I wasn't. I _know_."

He leans back, satisfied that that'll shut Steve up for a long while, but he barely has time to tug the pack of smokes out of his pocket before he realizes Steve is laughing at him. 

Steve is _laughing_ at Bucky, a grin eating up his whole face. "Yeah, you tell it, Cagney," he says. "Whaddaya hear, whaddaya say - no, no, hang on. I'm sorry, you don't usually sound so - I'm sorry, Buck, come on."

Bucky looks down where Steve has grabbed his hand. Slowly allows himself to be guided back down, Steve's fingers tangled up with his. "You never told me, back then," Steve says. "Least you can do is give me a chance now."

Bucky pulls his hand away, looks out over the water. "I'm not that guy anymore, Steve. Haven't you been listening to me?"

"That guy I was never woulda gave it a shot," Steve says, and Bucky looks back at him, sharply. "Maybe he didn't know he could. I dunno, Buck. You tell me. What kind of people are you and me now?"

Bucky pulls a cigarette out of the pack, lights it with his left hand, which never shakes. He draws in a lungful, lets it out towards the water. "You gonna hear me, if I tell you?" he asks, finally.

"I know you'll tell me if I'm not," Steve says, the line of his mouth trying hard to curl. 

Bucky holds out his right hand, tangles their fingers back together when Steve takes it. They both glance over their shoulders but no one's watching, no one's even close. They're as alone as they can be, looking out across the river, towards the rest of the world. Steve's fingers are warm against his own.

He licks his lips. Takes another breath. And starts: "When I didn't die, they cut off my arm, above the elbow. They never once asked me any questions ..."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have a tumblr - [come say hi!](http://mssr-herringbone.tumblr.com/) I can't promise I know how to use it.

**Author's Note:**

> So I've been out of fandom for a long time, but goddammit, I had a lot of Bucky Barnes feels. And then I started writing this, and it turns out I had even more Sam Wilson feels. I know. 
> 
> I have a tumblr - [come say hi!](http://mssr-herringbone.tumblr.com/) I can't promise I know how to use it.


End file.
